Clear Pond: The Reconstruction of a Life

by Roger Mitchell

Book Overview

The winner of the John Ben Snow Prize delves into the life of a 19th-century Adirondack millwright and arrives at a greater awareness of his own reality. Despite having developed patents for a type of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081560257X
• ISBN13: 9780815602576
• Release Date: June 1991
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Window to the past

For anyone already bitten by the genealogy bug, this book will chart a familiar path. For anyone who is contemplating undertaking research on their family's history, read this first: it captures perfectly the passion and the curiosity that propels the researcher in what is often a confusing and frustrating quest, with many dead ends. More important, Mitchell manages both to give personality and character to his long-dead subjects, and to make the time and place in which they lived come alive for us. It is "human" history on a personal scale.

A Historical Detective Story

Roger Mitchell is a poet, not a professional historian. He became intrigued, even obsessed, by a random historical question. This is a book, not only about a place and its people. It is an account of an author's passionate search for an answer. In a quest for an old-time Adirondacker, Mitchell investigated the history of one, rather ordinary, Yankee family in the Adirondacks. His poetic narrative provides a profile in microcosm of authentic Adirondack culture. This book is already a classic of Adirondack literature.